Ukraine election due to start, but who will vote?

Novgorodskoe: As Ukrainians vote for a new leader today, the four or five thousand people who live in this one-factory town are unlikely to turn out in big numbers to help fill an office that local separatist leaders describe as the president of a ‘‘neighbouring state’’.

But the reasons they gave were more nuanced than the "we want to join Russia" battle cry of the separatist movement that wants to follow the lead of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula, which has been annexed by Moscow.

Deserted: A polling station in the east Ukrainian town of Novgorodskoe. Photo: Kate Geraghty

According to Ukrainian opinion polls, not the most reliable barometers of sentiment, the confectionary and chocolate billionaire Petro Poroshenko is alone in the field of 21 candidates in commanding double-digit support – about 40 per cent. If he falls short of 50 per cent, he will face a run-off ballot, possibly against former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko.

Both candidates have little or no support in the east, leaving analysts divided on whether Sunday’s vote, expected to be peaceful in all but this economically strategic swathe of the country adjoining Russia, will defuse the crisis or ramp it to new levels of bloodshed and disruption.

Historian: Retired general engineer Viktor Kovalev at the phenol factory where he worked. Photo: Kate Geraghty

On Saturday there were skirmishes across the districts of Donetsk and Luhansk, which voted "yes" overwhelmingly in a secessionist referendum on May 11, causing electoral officials to hedge on where locals could vote – maybe in all the usual places, but possibly behind security cordons at the airport and the city stadium in Donetsk; and maybe on the factory floor at enterprises where the country’s richest man employs 300,000 locals in Donetsk and at Mariupol, to the south.

At Slaviansk, the one city under full rebel control, there were reports of heavy fighting on Saturday night and low expectations that voting would proceed Sunday. Elsewhere, ballot papers were being delivered under armed guard – despite repeated separatist warnings that the ballot will be disrupted and voters detained.

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In Donetsk, the regional centre, there were reports of balaclava-wearing militiamen seizing ballot boxes from prospective polling places and carting them away to be destroyed.

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Elsewhere, election offices have been attacked and officials shot at or abducted. At Bilovodsk, north of Luhansk, local election chief Vladimir Nesmiyanov told reporters he could not deliver voting materials to 86 out of 197 polling stations. He had been warned that separatists were ‘‘waiting for him,’’ if he tried.

Here in Novgorodskoe, a 40-minute drive north-east from Donetsk, five see-through Perspex boxes stood sentinel next to a row of voting booths that were curtained in the national colours – sky blue and canola yellow – at an ornate 1950s hall.

Pausing as she weeded her garden, Lybov Surovets said there was no way she would go near the polling station – ‘‘I’m too afraid to, because people say gunmen will be there too’’. At the town bus station, two men who declined to identify themselves said they would vote if the booths opened, but they did not know who to vote for. And nearby, a 75-year-old woman who sheltered behind big sunglasses, declared: ‘‘There’s no one we want to vote for – so we won’t.’’

Novgorodskoe has been spared from the blood lust and barricades. But in their quiet way, the locals have been responsible for quite a bit of destruction – the town’s factory produces phenols and for decades has been a key supplier to Moscow’s munitions industry.

‘‘In the West, many say that we are criminals – and this is not far from the truth,’’ observed a local wag, before outlining a shakedown that took place in the 1990s.

That was when regional gangster factions went to war. A good many were gunned down, with some of the bodies being disappeared in a lake of acid waste at the back of this town. The survivors donned suits and called themselves businessmen or politicians. Among them, he points out, was Viktor Yanukovych, the former president whose ouster in February lit the fuse for the crisis – he had been jailed twice in the past. Their government-owned factory was part of the spoils in that war – ending up today as a tiny part of the business empire of that very rich businessman whose factories are expected to become polling places, Rinat Akhmetov.

The town’s self-appointed historian Viktor Kovalev enjoys telling visitors the literal translation of its name – New York. And he explains the local politics – the town’s 85-plus per cent vote in the secession referendum was more a swipe at the Kiev government than a wish to join Russia.

So would they vote in Sunday’s presidential ballot? He shrugged his shoulders.

After sitting on his hands for months, the factory owner Akhmetov had taken to urging his huge labour force to stand against the secessionists.

‘‘But maybe he’s too late,’’ says Kovalev. ‘‘Things might have turned out differently if he had acted earlier. He says he wants to talk to the separatists, but they don’t want to talk to him.’’

Like the front-running presidential candidate Petro Poroshenko, Akhmetov is one of a handful of so-called oligarchs who carved up Ukraine’s government-owned industries on the collapse of the Soviet Union. That means still having to do business with Moscow – which is presumed to be the reason for Akhmetov’s late entry to the crisis.

And these days, he doesn’t hold back. ‘‘If some of you believe that [the separatists] are leading us to success, this is a mistake,’’ he said in a televised statement this week. ‘‘They are leading to collapse, poverty and hunger.’’

After the referendum he ordered his workers to take to the streets of the southern city of Mariupol, to wrest back control of public buildings occupied by the separatists, who he has taken to denouncing as "savages".

Urging people to vote, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk on Saturday declared with customary confidence: ‘‘I would like to assure our compatriots in Donetsk and Luhansk regions, who will be prevented from coming to the polling stations by the war waged against Ukraine: The criminals don’t have much time left to terrorise your land.’’

Meanwhile a conference of separatists in Donetsk was pushing the boundaries for their new state, to be called Novorossiya, or new Russia, well beyond the two districts that voted in the secession referendum. A declaration issued by the meeting called for much of the east of the country to break away, including the oblasts or districts of Odessa, Nikolaev, Dnepropetrovsk, Zaptorozhye, Kharkov, Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

That’s a problem – this crisis is reaching a point of developing a life of its own.